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Giant Bomb Thread #5 - We love you, Ryan Davis

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Watching Bradley may Cry reminds me of how stupid the arguments against the departure in style in the new DMC games are. You don't like it because of how it plays, fine. But my god, this is nothing but cheese, up and down, left and right.
 
DMC's cheese is goofy and dumb, and much preferable to the embarrassing overuse of profanity and grotesque images that Ninja Theory shoved into their ripoff of They Live masquerading as a Devil May Cry game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTQFpwZwk-w

The arguments aren't stupid at all.

http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/game/xbox-360-ps3/dmc-devil-may-cry

This Dante is Dante, as far as Dantes go, and he bears enough similarities to the precocious and cock-sure teen of Devil May Cry 3 that he'll do in a pinch. He is a "bad-boy" like his past incarnations, but to the extreme, and it's satisfying to see a disaffected, surly, lithe-thing of a character when we're used to only bulky meatheads or starry-eyed teens in our leading roles. These parts of him are different enough to be worthy of attention, if only attention-worthy because they are rare in the context of videogames and not any other sort of media.

But jeez does he have no idea how to swear.

This Dante has a handful of interesting characteristics, nearly all of which are neatly overwritten by his generic "bad-ittude." He has a pithy line for each new enemy type and they're all awful because they're all played completely straight. He is a pretty generic adolescent power fantasy who receives a teeny-tiny object lesson on personal responsibility towards the end, but that's about it. The bulk of his time, and his antagonists' time, is spent shouting F-off, and F-you, and F-this.

Devil May Cry's characters and characterization are not inviolate (DMC2 proved that without question). However, for all the teen angst and self-assured mercenaries and swords-through-chests of the original series, the reasons we like Devil May Cry, and the reasons we like Dante, are not entirely the reasons DmC seems to think we do. It thinks we want a supremely confident asshole of a main character who flips the bird to his enemies. But we liked the old Dante because he was dumb, and kind of silly, and his worst bit of verbal sparring involved the words "flock off, feather-face."

DmC feels very vulgar, and frequently a little gross, for no purpose other than someone somewhere got the idea that "cool" and "profane" were synonymous and they haven't been able to shake it. The issue isn't puritanical, it's to do with a pervasive sense the writing isn't swearing because it wants to, it's swearing because the game wants, desperately, for its player to think it is edgy, as if there is anything edgy about cursing in the 21st century. It's not offensive, just forced, just too... obvious. There's barely anyone, even the good guys, who refers to a female character without calling her a bitch or a whore. That's the actual problem: there ain't no subtlety.

And haven't we outgrown that? Is this what people think we want? Because the first Devil May Cry ended with Dante shooting a tentacled stone statue to death before making a daring escape in a biplane. It was foolish, but it was sincere in its foolishness. It certainly didn't have the temerity to crib a substantial portion of its plot from They Live, with "OBEY" painted in big block letters across the demon dimension. Ninja Theory avoids its proclivity towards scenery chewing antagonists, for the most part, but there's still plenty of gross-out art design that induces eye-rolls and head-shakes. This makes it hard to take seriously the decent writing (tension between Dante and Vergil, Dante's quasi-romantic relationship with Kat) amid the chaff of acid-vomiting bosses, and threats of fists shoved up asses, and jokes about fat people.
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Nope. Nope. Nope.

When Sam called his daughter there in the beginning and Sam talked. Nope. Nope.

That is not Sam.

They fucked up. They really fucked up.

Fucked up. They did just that.
 
strafer said:
Nope. Nope. Nope.

When Sam called his daughter there in the beginning and Sam talked. Nope. Nope.

That is not Sam.

They fucked up. They really fucked up.

Fucked up. They did just that.
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I'm otherwise quite enjoying Blacklist, but Sam's voice is fucking weird. Like, they keep on making reference to him having a teenage daughter, and him being old, but he sounds 25 and looks like a silver-haired 35.
 
XANDER CAGE said:
I'm otherwise quite enjoying Blacklist, but Sam's voice is fucking weird. Like, they keep on making reference to him having a teenage daughter, and him being old, but he sounds 25 and looks like a silver-haired 35.
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That's the first thing I noticed as soon as the QL started. I was like "Who the fuck is this bro?" He looks 15 years younger than he did at the start of conviction.
 
Terrorists could never break him, but it looks like Sam Fisher had to succumb to the focus testing.

Kids love their white male mid-30s heroes.
 
Someone needs to stop Brad and other game journalists from completely abusing the term "min-max". It's a certain strategy used in the act of leveling up, not just the simple act of leveling up. It does not look like min-maxing is even possible in X-Com Declassified as far as I can tell.

I'm not talking about just it's misuse in just the one quicklook which maybe an honest mistake, but a general misuse of it everywhere by many game journalists.
 
thepotatoman said:
Someone needs to stop Brad and other game journalists from completely abusing the term "min-max". It's a certain strategy used in the act of leveling up, not just the simple act of leveling up. It does not look like min-maxing is even possible in X-Com Declassified as far as I can tell.

I'm not talking about just it's misuse in just the one quicklook which maybe an honest mistake, but a general misuse of it everywhere by many game journalists.
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Exactly, as far as you can tell.

Play more and then accuse him.
 
Mesoian said:
Watching Bradley may Cry reminds me of how stupid the arguments against the departure in style in the new DMC games are. You don't like it because of how it plays, fine. But my god, this is nothing but cheese, up and down, left and right.
Click to expand...

I feel like there's a small, slightly, tiny-but-perceptible difference from "Flock off, featherface" and Dante screaming "Fuck you" until the enemy vomits everywhere
 
The gameplay in Blacklist actually seems alright, but everything else seems really lame and unnecessary. The new VA for Sam is awful, I don't know what the hell they were thinking. They should've just gone with a totally new character and had Ironside be the behind the scenes support dude.
 
that SC QL was amazing. every 5 minutes or so that game managed to impress by delving deeper and deeper into tom clancy-esque right-wing porn territory.

This feels like a great example of a shooter that has the issues explored in Spec Ops:the line. The drone sequence in particular reminded me
of the sequence in spec ops with the white phosphorus,
and how sanitized SC made the act seem by comparison.
 
I'm only a few hours into it, but I'm absolutely loving the gameplay and style of the DMC remake, and I liked the original games as well. It's fresh, it's vulgar, so what? I love how cheesy and dumb it is. NeoDante is a douche, but he's a funny one.
 
bonercop said:
that SC QL was amazing. every 5 minutes or so that game managed to impress by delving deeper and deeper into tom clancy-esque right-wing porn territory.

.
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It is years since I read a Tom Clancy book but I don't remember them being especially right wing. The MC in most of his books is pretty liberal. Or is it just the games? Splinter Cell etc have very little to do with Clancy other than Ubi bought rights to slap his name on anything they like.
 
popo said:
It is years since I read a Tom Clancy book but I don't remember them being especially right wing. The MC in most of his books is pretty liberal. Or is it just the games? Splinter Cell etc have very little to do with Clancy other than Ubi bought rights to slap his name on anything they like.
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Did you ever read the Jack Ryan books once he became President? Straight up right-wing porn. Supreme Court bans abortion, flat tax, vouchers for schools, big increases in military spending, so on, and so forth, along with a blowjob for Wall Street because Ryan made his money through investing. Plus, the main Democrat opposing him is Ted Kennedy + Bill Clinton without the good qualities of each, leaving only a calculating scummy womanizer.
 
popo said:
It is years since I read a Tom Clancy book but I don't remember them being especially right wing. The MC in most of his books is pretty liberal. Or is it just the games? Splinter Cell etc have very little to do with Clancy other than Ubi bought rights to slap his name on anything they like.
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Virtually every Tom Clancy work I have ever laid my eyes on is terribly jingoistic, culturally ignorant/insensitive and usually glorifies authority, violence, torture and the military.
 
bonercop said:
Virtually every Tom Clancy work I have ever laid my eyes on is terribly jingoistic, culturally ignorant/insensitive and usually glorifies authority, violence, torture and the military.
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Which novels are you specifically referring to? I don't recall a ton of that in stuff like Red October or Red Storm Rising.
 
If the QL wasn't proof enough, I just beat Saints Row 4 on PC and loved it. Just started on 360 to play coop with a buddy and wooboy is it rough. Jeff was right to knock a star off. Those without a PC option shouldn't be deterred if you loved SR 3 though, it's still a great game.

Lingitiz said:
The gameplay in Blacklist actually seems alright, but everything else seems really lame and unnecessary. The new VA for Sam is awful, I don't know what the hell they were thinking. They should've just gone with a totally new character and had Ironside be the behind the scenes support dude.
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A friend of mine who is a huge SC fan managed to get over the change of voice actor, but hated the gameplay. What's weird is that he liked Conviction but didn't like Pandora Tomorrow, which seems to go against the general consensus (never really played enough SC myself to know).
 
LackingSaint said:
Aaaand it's out! Hope you guys like it, it's been a lot of work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAhdhIHc40o

Likes, Favourites, Subscriptions and Comments are all really appreciated!
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Holy shit. I did a legitimate spit-take on this.

Beast Legacy said:
A friend of mine who is a huge SC fan managed to get over the change of voice actor, but hated the gameplay. What's weird is that he liked Conviction but didn't like Pandora Tomorrow, which seems to go against the general consensus (never really played enough SC myself to know).
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Pandora tomorrow is just a bad game in general (Imo). Conviction is full of Mainstream-appeal changes but I liked the direction the presentation went in a lot. Overall it is inoffensive, but it isn't the same type of game as the other 4 and I can understand how anyone could not like it.
 
Beast Legacy said:
A friend of mine who is a huge SC fan managed to get over the change of voice actor, but hated the gameplay. What's weird is that he liked Conviction but didn't like Pandora Tomorrow, which seems to go against the general consensus (never really played enough SC myself to know).
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Actually, I'm not sure if the change in VA is biggest issue. The writing for Sam is completely different. He seems to have no personality whatsoever, and is just a generic military Cod dude now.

Sam had pretty great dialogue in Chaos Theory with Grim and Lambert. He was sarcastic, dry, and cynical, but nothing I'm seeing here has any of that.
 
bonercop said:
Never read either of those. I think Clancy's a pretty crap author, so it's not like I'm intimately familiar with his body of work. I think I read this one, though.
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That's one of his more poor works. I liked Red Storm Rising the best, he does a good job showing both the western and Soviet sides of a fictional global war between them, as well as showing how incompetence on both sides' higher military ranks end up costing their forces and losing more lives. It's also standalone and not part of the Ryanverse mess that started to get out of hand from Rainbow Six on (though some would claim it really started going downhill from Debt of Honor).
 
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